This book examines the relationship between the writings of Henry James and the historical formation of mass culture. Throughout his career, James was concerned with such characteristically modern cultural forms as advertising, biography and the New Journalism, forms which together constituted the 'devouring publicity' of modern life. Richard Salmon's study situates James's fiction and criticism within the context of the contemporary debates surrounding these rival discursive practices. He explores both the nature of James's contribution to the critique of mass culture and the extent of his immersion within it. James's persistent and ambivalent negotiation of the boundaries between private and public experience ranged from a defence of the artist's right to privacy, to his own counter-practice of publicity.

This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself.

The true meaning of being fashionably late in Henry James's late works.

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea continues the story of Isabel Archer, the young protagonist of Henry James’s beloved The Portrait of a Lady—in this masterful novel of betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity. Eager but naïve, in James’s novel Isabel comes into a large, unforeseen inheritance and marries the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond. Here Banville imagines Isabel’s second chapter telling the story of a woman reawakened by grief and the knowledge that she has been grievously wronged, and determined to resume her quest for freedom and independence.

Rowe uses recent work on the oppressive treatment of gays, women and children in his analysis of Henry James, arguing that James mounts a critique of bourgeois values and lack of historical consciousness.

The author traces Henry James's career-long encounter with the tradition of British aestheticism and places both in the context of the late-19th-century's professionalization and commodification of literary life. Professions of Taste reopens the question of later James in a new fashion and with a new perspective. A richer genealogy of modernism, and indeed postmodernism, begins to take shape, in which both the problematics of British aestheticism and James's relations with it play an important role. This book aims to enlighten the reader's understanding of the way Pre-Raphaelite concerns fertilized the aestheticist breeding grounds of Anglo-American modernism.

This volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883–1884 includes 178 letters, of which 117 are published for the first time, written from January 2, 1883, to January 29, 1884. The letters trace the development of Henry James’s literary career as well as the maturation of his international reputation as a public figure. They also record James’s recovery following the deaths of his parents and brother, the difficult execution of his father’s will, and his return to England from an extended stay in the United States. This volume concludes with James’s continuing efforts to maximize his writing income.

Employing a wide range of interpretive and theoretical approaches, this collection brings together distinguished James scholars from four continents to elicit new and exciting readings of a diverse array of James’s fiction and non-fiction. Through their transformative acts, the essays investigate James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites; offer theoretically informed readings of his work’s textual richness; and explore his intricate involvement with social and cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, economics, friendship and hospitality, and visual culture. Arranged under rubrics which signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as a historical individual and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, the contributions collected in this book make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles and, therefore, for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies.